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Month January 2014

It is one of the most iconic images of motherhood: A new mother, still recovering from labor but beaming as she holds a newborn in her arms. But the mothers of fragile preemies too often miss this amazing moment.

“All those dreams I had for bonding with my new baby are now nightmares because I couldn’t even hold my baby for the first few days,” wrote preemie mom Jennifer Sweetman on the site preemiebabies101.com.

The makers of a new device hope that parents like Sweetman will someday rest assured that even when pre-term infants are separated from their mothers for days or weeks at a time, they can still feel the sensation of being near their mothers and reap health benefits as a result.

Do you speak “parentese” with your baby? If not, you might want to start. A new study has found that infants and young toddlers exposed to more “parentese” through one-on-one interactions with their caregivers had much larger vocabularies by age 2 than their peers.

The findings “are consistent with the idea that infants’ early speech and later word production may be related to the social context and the style of speech directed toward the child,” researchers from the University of Connecticut and the University of Washington wrote in an article to be published in the journal Developmental Science.

So what exactly is “parentese”? Think baby talk, but less “googoo, gaga” and more “shooooes” and “diiiaper.”

Is your boss reluctant to let you telecommute? You’ll want to tell her about this: A recent study led by a Stanford University economist and a Chinese graduate student found that call center workers at a Chinese travel website were more productive when working at home than their peers who worked at the office.

Orin Hahn loves to throw a good dinner party. The New Yorker hosts soirees for his friends as often as every other week, treating them to dishes that include guaranteed crowd pleasers (kale salad) to adventurous entrees (wine-braised octopus.) But it takes more than just mouth-watering cuisine to make for a great dinner party… Read more at eHow.com.